thu 12/12/2024

Academy Awards

Spirited Away, London Coliseum review - spectacular re-imagining of beloved film

Legions of Ghibli fanatics may love the heartwarming My Neighbour Totoro and the heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies, but they revere Spirited Away, their, our, The Godfather and The Wizard of Oz rolled into one. Totoro has been magnificently...

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Oscars 2024: politics aplenty but few surprises as 'Oppenheimer' dominates

Oppenheimer as expected dominated the 96th Academy Awards, winning seven trophies whilst runner-up Poor Things took four prizes, including Emma Stone in the hotly contested category of best actress.There was a pro forma feeling to the roll call of...

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theartsdesk Q&A: Wim Wenders on 'Perfect Days'

Wim Wenders’ latest narrative film Perfect Days might seem an uncommonly mellow work by the maker of Alice in the Cities (1974), The American Friend (1977), Paris, Texas (1984), and Wings of Desire (1987), but it still finds the 78-year-old...

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The Color Purple review - sensational second time round for Alice Walker's novel on screen

How many re-tellings can Alice Walker's The Color Purple take? A helluva lot, as the candid Sofia, one of the work's seminal characters, might put it.Adapted by Steven Spielberg for the screen in 1985, and then as a Broadway musical that had two...

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Oscars 2023 - the favourite lives up to its title

Everything Everywhere All at Once lived up to its title Sunday night at the 95th Academy Awards by managing to win nearly everything everywhere almost all at once. The fragmented, seriocomic celluloid head trip won seven of the 11 Oscars for which...

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Ennio review - sprawling biog of the maestro of movie music

Ennio Morricone’s collaboration with director Giuseppe Tornatore on 1988’s Cinema Paradiso was one of the countless highlights of his career, and it’s Tornatore who has masterminded this sprawling documentary tribute to the composer, who died in...

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Flee review - award-winning documentary portrays the refugee experience

It’s good timing for the release of Flee in UK cinemas. The Danish movie has just made Oscar history by being nominated in three categories – Animated Feature, Documentary, and International Feature and is bound to win in at least one of them. ...

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Best of 2021: Film

Like every other artform, cinema suffered greatly in a year of lockdowns. But despite an ever-changing outlook, theartsdesk still managed to review over 130 films in 2021!Long-awaited blockbusters and no-budget indies fought for screen space big and...

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DVD/Blu-ray: Another Round

Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen left me dumbstruck in the cinema in 1998 with its brilliant depiction of an incestuous, viciously glamorous family imploding over a family celebration. At the time, I hoped that my Danish mother never saw what looked, to...

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DVD/Blu-ray: All About Eve

Rivalled only by Titanic and La La Land for its 14 Oscar nominations, 1950's Best Picture-winner All About Eve is a film that audiences and reviewers love – even though Joseph L Mankiewicz’s brilliant screenplay makes...

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Oscars 2021: Sluggish, yes, but some surprises too

“God gave us 12 notes,” said Jon Batiste as he accepted the Best Score Oscar for the animated film Soul. True enough, even if it felt from very early on as if the 93rd Academy Awards might well last 12 hours, the ceremony flickering to life in its...

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Filmmaker Darius Marder: 'Deafness is a culture. That's not being PC'

Sound of Metal has been a long time coming. Director and writer Darius Marder faced years of delays ranging from casting changes to the whole world shutting down. Was it worth the wait? Well, six Academy Award nominations including Best Film...

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